Remembering Luboml's Final Hours
Nathan Sobel is one of Luboml's 51 Holocaust survivors. In 1938, Aaron Ziegelman and Nathan Sobel were classmates in Luboml. Sobel's family survived initial Nazi massacres by hiding in a dugout his father built under an apple tree in their yard. A crawlspace from their kitchen provided access to the shelter. In 1941, his father and sister were killed, and on 1 October 1942, his mother and brother were killed. They are four of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, and Luboml was only one of the many Shtetls destroyed by the Nazis and their allies. Nathan is the only survivor of his family.
He remembers the night the men with the guns came for his family. They were herded into a small hut. In the confusion, Nathan, a small boy then, climbed unobserved into a hayloft-narrowly escaping. A man with a machine gun came and told everyone to lie down on the floor. "I just stood there and looked down. I saw everything." The men knew someone was missing, and started looking for Nathan, who had dug deeper into the straw. He was not found, but the men set the building on fire. "I was in part of the inferno." Then he jumped down and fled.
After the war, Sobel was shunted from France to Palestine (Israel) before he was reunited with an aunt in the United States. He is the editor of the English translation of Luboml: Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl (New York: KTAV, 1997).